As is the case in many facets of industry, education, government, and other institutions, computers have greatly facilitated the work of law enforcement agencies. For example, when a police officer witnesses an operator of a motor vehicle commit a traffic violation or for some other reason is suspicious of a motor vehicle, the officer can transmit the vehicle's license plate number to the officer's headquarters via radio, telephone, or a computer on-board the vehicle. Law enforcement computers can search criminal databases to determine if the car has been stolen, if the owner is the subject of an active arrest warrant, if the owner or suspected operator may pose a risk of harm to the officer or others. In addition, when police are able to collect fingerprints or secure an image of a person who was present at a crime scene (i.e., a photograph from a security camera or a drawing prepared by a police artist), law enforcement computers can seek persons with corresponding fingerprint records or facial recognition data to identify perpetrators or material witnesses. Such computer applications have provided a great benefit to law enforcement.
On the other hand, computers have not been used to their fullest advantage in all aspects of law enforcement. For example, when a call-for-service is received by police agencies, such as in the form of a 911 emergency call or a non-emergency call, the information provided by the caller and/or collected by the operator receiving the call is frequently entered directly into a computer system. The information recorded may include a time at which the call is received, a location from which the call is placed, and similar details about the context of the call. The operator receiving the call may assign a code to the call that the operator believes represents the nature of the call-for-service. Also, the operator may enter other information provided by the caller that provides some details about the circumstances of the call. For example, if the caller is reporting disorderly conduct associated with an alcohol-related disturbance involving youth, relevant narrative may be entered describing the nature of the call. The data entered in the computer system may be used to dispatch appropriate personnel and/or to track how many such calls have been received.
However, call-for-service data arguably is underutilized by law enforcement agencies. While some of the data collected in structured fields of the data, such as the time of a call, the assigned code indicating the type of the reported offense may be processed to yield some reports, the totality of the information received in such calls may not be used to fully analyze the stored information to help in planning to respond to the incidence of crime or to attempt to decrease or prevent the incidence of crime. Analyzing the data may require manpower or computing resources that law enforcement agencies do not have or cannot afford.
Thus, it would be desirable to provide methods to enable workable affordable tools to enable law enforcement agencies to make better use of data collected from calls-for-service.